Reply to Gifted programs, lack of, in DC

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]According to the Census, there are only 24,000 kids aged 10-14 in DC--and that's a major overstatement of how many high schoolers there will be in a few years since families will send kids to private  school or move out of the District.  Even if they all went to public high school, about half would be in charters. The top 1% of DCPS kids would only be 24 kids per grade, which is not enough to run a very interesting high school--especially since the top couple dozen most gifted kids in DC are not going to be gifted in the same way: some are going to want to do physics research and some are going to write plays and some are going to build computers and some want to learn Hindi and study international relations.

I think the DCPS application high schools plus AP at Wilson and [b]IB at Eastern offer rigorous curricula, though the schools each have aspects that make them not a great fit for certain kids.[/b]  A motivated student can also use the resources of the universities, agencies, organizations, etc. in the city to do a whole lot more.

Fixing the pipeline seems like a useful step--identifying smart kids at early grades and working with them in ways parents like.  And there could be improvements (different ones for each school) at SWW, Banneker, Wilson, Eastern, etc. But building a whole new TJ-like school makes a lot less sense to me than working on McKinley Tech, which has the same aims.[/quote]

Have you talked to the top IB Diploma candidates at Eastern lately, or their IB Diploma Program Coordinator?  Do you know that the "rigorous curricula" you describe led to a first-year IB Diploma pass rate in the mid 20s, versus in the high 30s in the better suburban programs (the IB Diploma Point pass range is 24-45)?   This year, half the Diploma candidates couldn't earn the minimum 24 points.  Flash forward ten years, and little is likely to have changed at the rate we're going.

You're not fooling me because I've volunteered in Eastern's fraught IB Diploma Program.  Nobody else should be fooled either.  Not a good fit for certain kids, my foot.  Try middle class kids, period.

[/quote]

I said it was a rigorous curriculum. The fact that many kids who attempt it don't get the minimum score to pass just proves that point.  If Eastern all of a sudden had 50 kids who scored 4s and 5s on PARCC enter each grade, there would be more kids passing.  The problem isn't IB.  The problem is that too few kids go into high school with the skills needed to do IB.  If you have a kid who has the skills, then IB will be there for them.  Now, there may be other problems at Eastern--how is classroom discipline?  Are kids who don't want to/can't do IB  put into IB classes because the school doesn't want to have a teacher working with only 5 students?  Those are issues, but they are solvable--and the solution isn't to remove IB.  [/quote]

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